While talking about the growth of VLTs, Nelson says the following:

I’m always fascinated when people get addicted to virtual things, which often times seem to boil down to a game that involves risk and intermittent reward — where does this tendency come from?

There is a large class of human behaviours which fall under this structure. Consider an action like checking e-mail throughout the day. There is a risk that your checking of e-mail will return nothing (except your disrupted focus), while there is an intermittent reward of getting an interesting or exciting e-mail. Finding food for many animals might be a similar sort of situation. I would guess that the tendency is probably rooted deeply in human (and other animals’) psychology, and serves very useful functions as well as not-so-useful ones.

It seems that a lot of time and effort has been put into designing better jet engines for airplanes, for example, but relatively little has been put into designing better customer spaces within those airplanes. Perhaps some of this is itself by design (that is, airplane companies want to differentiate economy class from first class, and so intentionally make the economy class uncomfortable, barren, and so on).

Better jet engines can make a flight take less time (among other things), but better customer spaces can make a flight seem like it takes less time (because it is more comfortable, or there are things you can more easily do that will make time seem to pass more quickly), and from a customer’s perspective, the latter can be more important.

I was on an airplane recently that had a relatively simple design innovation - cup holders that folded out of the top of the seat-back in front of you. This was great, because it meant you could have a drink while not having the tray folded down and so interfering with the little space you have in front of you. This is a relatively trivial design modification that has made the “user-interface” of airplanes significantly better. (Often with user-interfaces, the best innovations are the simple ones.)

(Another obvious example of something that isn’t exactly a technology is customer service while on an airplane. I have started to disregard the cheapest air fares, and instead look to travel with companies that provide excellent customer service, because this can often add a large amount of value to a flight (if only in the conviviality of the other customers).)

Consider: if you’re paying $400 for a flight, and the flight takes 4 hours, that’s effectively $100 per hour. However, you now have 4 hours of potential value creation while on the flight. If you’re in an environment that is comfortable and so on (i.e., is conducive to you creating value), you might actually create more value than the cost of the flight. For example, if you’re able to engage in high-productivity work that will generate $400 for you, the flight becomes free. (I think this line of thought is how some people justify first-class airfares. On long flights, for example, what is a good sleep worth to you? Well, if you don’t get a good sleep how will that impact your next day? What is the potential value you could create the next day? And so on.)

Here are some simple questions that I’m sure have better answers than are currently embodied in plane design:

How do you make seats more comfortable without expanding their size (for example, changing the cushioning, changing the armrest materials, and so on)?

How do you make seats more comfortable for sleeping, or alternately can you provide things that help expedite sleep (a few examples of this are sleep guided meditation channels combined with earphones that better block the background sound of being on an airplane, and advances in head supports or head rests)?

How do you better utilize the back surface area of chairs for customer usage?

How do you increase the space available for customers (for example, can you make seats more thin by changing construction materials)?

My suspicion is that there is something irrational afoot in how airplanes are typically made vis a vis the R&D put into enhancing customer experience.

I noticed that GMail has an Offline feature in their “Labs” (experimental features that may change or not be completed). If you use GMail, you can enable by logging into your GMail account, clicking Settings, Labs, and then select to Enable the Offline feature. You can then click the Offline link in your inbox to switch to the offline mode.

This must be one of the biggest disadvantages to “online” e-mail programs (such as GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and so on) for a large number of people. If GMail is able to seemlessly integrate offline and online modes, they should be able to significantly increase the competitiveness of their e-mail.

Probably the most important things in the world are the boring ones. Slow, plodding, everyday factors that in the end make the real difference. Demographics is foremost of these. It is clear from trends - with a little bit of common-sense extrapolation - that the world population is about to enter a free-fall.*

* ‘about’ here means within the next 50 years

While people are still going on about the dangers of the Earth having more people, population decrease is already happening in “first-world” countries - buoyed only by large amounts of immigration. Canada is a good example. It imports nearly 1% of its population every year, causing a dramatic change in the cultural and ethnic make up of the country. The reasons for this government policy are probably fairly complex, but one argument for it is that a rapidly decreasing population will cause economic hardship. If indeed the whole world starts to experience population loss, this strategy will probably become less and less tenable, regardless of the merits of arguments for it.

We’ve been learning how to deal with population growth for some time, but the Western world hasn’t seen sustained population decrease for a long, long time. Significant population growth in the world started around 1750, and for the previous 3,000 years it seems that human population growth was occurring more slowly. Before that, it seems population levels were relatively stationary.

So what is more dangerous - continued population increase or population decrease? This question doesn’t seem to be debated that often, so the implicit answer would be “population increase”. How do we know that, however?

Eagle Eye, a political thriller that features elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terminator, is a thought provoking film about surveillance and inter-connectivity. However, it’s also a little silly. The reason is that “Artificial Intelligence” - i.e., getting computers to behave like adult human organisms - doesn’t really work, yet. Much of what seems like “intelligent” behaviour from computers is actually “kludges”, neat programming tricks, and so on - probably nothing like how humans actually do it.

The consensus emerging from computational intelligence studies in the last few years is that either a) the brain is much more computationally powerful than previously thought (in particular, that neurons don’t compute just by their connections to each other - inter-neural - but also that within each neuron there is a significant amount of computation - intra-neural), or b) the process by which humans and other organisms develop “intelligent” behavioural capacities is very different from how scientists are currently trying to get computers to develop these sorts of capacities. My guess is that it’s a mix of both. Brains contain a lot more sophisticated of causal processes than previously thought ( a) ) and the way to get the sort of “intelligent” behaviour typical of human organisms requires different ways of setting up those causal processes than we have currently been doing ( b) ).

The short of this is that behaviour such as Eagle Eye’s computer is nowhere to be seen in current computers. People who don’t know how computer programs work often don’t have a sense of the range of possibilities, and so science fiction writers such as Eagle Eye’s can make up stories about things happening that are absurd. This is similar to myths where fantastic things happen to the characters - if you don’t understand the limits of “magic” then saying that a woman turns into a tree or what have you doesn’t seem absurd, but once you start to develop a detailed logic of how things in this area work (biology, morphogenetics, and so on), you can start to discount these stories. This is the basic trajectory science has charted over the past several hundred years, overturning beliefs people had that nowadays seem far too credulous, but at the time didn’t seem so because they didn’t have a developed logic or model of how the world works in that area which would exclude that sort of phenomena.

Post-script: The term “computation” is also a little silly. The human brain is a complex causal process, and “computers” are also complex causal processes. There is nothing magic about computation, except that it is used to describe what “computers” typically do. When it comes to computers emulating what humans do, the programmers are trying to set up a set of causal processes in the computer that are similar to the causal processes in a human brain. In this sort of case, “computers” are just open-ended platforms for setting up relatively intricate causal processes, interfaced with typically by some “language”.

Is that really the best movie Hollywood’s elites could find? Sitting on a plane, nursing a cold, with nothing else to do but stare at the ceiling, I didn’t manage more than 20 minutes of Slumdog Millionaire.

The other movies were predictably boring in their politically correct ways. The Duchess of Devonshire espousing the principles of freedom and voting for all people (”Freedom is an absolute, either you have it or you don’t” - a big crowd-pleasing piece of nonsense if I have ever heard it, even if historically based), some woman visiting Australia and showing that she could herd cattle, too (I didn’t actually watch that one, but the wonder of back of the seat PEDs is that I really don’t have a choice in watching parts of it).

The only one I found relatively interesting was Eagle Eye. A strange infusion of 2001: A Space Odyssey into a political thriller, it made me rethink how often I have my cell phone on - even if many of its plot elements strayed so far across the line of disbelief that I found myself almost laughing. Even there, though, I didn’t finish it (maybe 9/10ths of the way, so perhaps there’s a big twist at the end which makes it better? I don’t know, and I don’t care).

I simultaneously want PEDs eliminated, and want way more content so that I can actually pick some more promising movies to watch. I’m sure that the latter is coming.

I have recently switched from Firefox Live Bookmarks to Thunderbird RSS for following blogs. With Thunderbird (see here), blog posts are treated like incoming e-mail. This is very neat. You can specify how often Thunderbird will check for new posts - or check manually - and when they arrive they look like new e-mail look. (You then keep a local copy of the blog post in Thunderbird, which can be useful for future reference, or click a link at the top of the blog post to view the actual posting through your web browser.)

The way I used Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, blog names were listed across the top of the screen, and to find out if there was a new post I had to click on (each) blog. That would drop down a menu and I would have to recognize if one or more were new. (You can have them displayed in a sidebar, but I find it takes up too much screen space.) With Thunderbird, a little number appears next to any of your blog names, indicating how many new posts have been retrieved, and you can view the status of all the blogs at a glance from the main Thunderbird sidebar (which I have displayed anyway in Thunderbird). This way, you can centralize your information into your e-mail client moreso, and can read the posts at your leisure, whether online or not.

As metaphors can help people to understand unfamiliar concepts with familiar ones, it seems pretty straightforward that metaphors in computer programming can be very helpful. Since I tend to think highly visually, I have problems with computer programming (which tends to be more naturally suited to people who think “algorithmically”).

When I was studying mathematics, one of the tricks I used to turn Bs into A+s was to figure out how to turn whatever new mathematical concept or equation that was in front of me into a visual representation.

In computer programming, some of the names for concepts lend themselves naturally to visual representations. A ’stack’ is like a stack of bricks, where the first one put down is the last one to be removed, as if you are building or tearing down a wall. A ‘queue’ is like a queue of people, where the last one to be added is the last one to reach the front desk. It’s easy to think of these concepts visually. What about an ‘array’, though? It’s not really that visual (perhaps you can think of an array of things in front of you, but that doesn’t capture the importance of the concept for computer programming). Replacing it with “cubicles” might be more useful. A single-dimensional array is like a line of cubicles. A 2-dimensional array like a wall of cubicles, a 3-dimensional array like a cube of cubicles, and so on. (You can even #define cubicles array and then program with the new name.)

One set of words that is particularly ill-chosen is “compile” and “link”. Uh, guys, these are almost interchangeable in terms of what they suggest to a regular English language person. You don’t need to use an abstract word to describe an abstract process. Rather, you can bring an abstract concept to life by using a concrete word to describe it. Instead, computer programming is littered with zombie concepts - poor, atrophied words that at one point probably had some life in them.

(”Compile” is a good example of this happening. It is probably from L. compilare, which means to plunder. The link is probably from the very visceral situation of piling goods together at some point in the plundering process. This was then borrowed for the concept of putting various written materials together into a single document. Perhaps it was a lively word when this first was done, but in the current context it simply brings to mind a vague notion of putting documents together.)

I’m sure this has been done, but it would be interesting to try a development environment where you can actually insert little icons that visually represent some common functionality, such as a “for” loop (a little motor at the top with a chain with a number next to it that represents how often it will loop?).

I’ve come to think that alarm clocks are usually a bad idea. There are a few exceptions to this (in particular, using them once in a while to catch a flight, for example).

Over the past few days, I’ve been using an alarm clock (due to temporary circumstances that involved me getting up earlier than usual). On day 3 of this, I felt sluggish and tired all morning. Sleep cycles are natural rhythms that, when disturbed, cause problems for the organism. Sleep involves important natural functions that play out during these cycles. If you need to use an alarm clock, it probably means one of two things:

1. You are not getting enough sleep, i.e., are going to bed too late.

or

2. You are getting poor sleeps - due to external stimuli, stress, worry, or what have you.

Either case is unhealthy. When you wake up, naturally you will feel good, excited, and so on. This is how you’re supposed to feel when you wake up. I say this as someone who used to have problems getting up in the morning (it turned out that my sleep cycle was distorted due to excessive worry). Alarm clocks simply cause or perpetuate an unhealthy system.